It's been quite refreshing lately to hear of all the good deeds happening this Christmas season.
In the past few weeks, we've heard of people donating money, personal items and their time to help others. We thoroughly enjoy telling those stories.
Those are just the stories we know of. We're certain there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of commendable efforts made by people in our community throughout the year.
We highlighted the top 10 stories of the year in Saturday's edition, and we were proud to see a few were what could be considered good, positive news. They include a record-breaking season from Mitchell High School graduate and standout basketball player Macy Miller; groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Avera Queen of Peace facility west of Cabela's and for Dakota Wesleyan University's wellness center.
A few of our top-viewed stories on our website, mitchellrepublic.com, could also be considered good news. A feature story about an 18-year-old woman whose steer won grand champion during the 2013 National Western livestock show had more than 15,000 views online.
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Again, we really enjoy telling stories that are inspirational or enlightening.
But, somewhat sadly, the news that draws the most interest from our readers are fires, accidents, injuries and death.
Take for example the devastating Wessington Springs tornado from June. Our reporters had their work cut out for them the night of the storm, and in the following days.
The immediate day after the tornado ripped through town, our website had its busiest day of the year (and quite possibly ever) with 121,400 pageviews. That was The Daily Republic's top story of the year.
Our second-busiest day for web traffic of the year came Sept. 11, at about 77,000 views. That was the day we had a story on the Davison County Sheriff's Office identifying a man who attempted to hang himself in his cell, and a story on a mysterious incident in Hanson County that the sheriff's office refused to commented on.
And finally, our third-busiest day online was when a house fire broke out on Sept. 4 and killed a student who attended Mitchell Technical Institute.
We had far too many fires, deaths and accidents in Mitchell in 2014. We covered trials of people convicted of murder and manslaughter and we saw a Letcher girl, Tanna Kingsbury, die far too young at 15 years old.
Some of our readers have told us we focus on too much of the bad and don't do enough good news. Trust us, we want to hear about the inspirational stories and we want to tell them. Please call and drop us a news tip.
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But numbers have proven that our readers are most interested in death, destruction and devastation.
